


A Story Walks Into A Bar

by Her_Madjesty



Category: Swan Lake & Related Fandoms, Лебединое озеро - Чайковский | Swan Lake - Tchaikovsky
Genre: Alternate Universe - Bar/Pub, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst, Angst and Feels, F/M, POV Outsider, Unreliable Narrator
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-14
Updated: 2020-07-14
Packaged: 2021-03-05 03:14:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,376
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25257526
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Her_Madjesty/pseuds/Her_Madjesty
Summary: Once upon a Friday night, a man with a red beard walks into a bar.
Relationships: Odette/Prints Siegfried | Prince Siegfried, Odette/Rothbart (Swan Princess), Odette/Von Rothbart (Lebedínoye Ózero | Swan Lake)
Comments: 6
Kudos: 12





	A Story Walks Into A Bar

**Author's Note:**

  * For [pinuspinea](https://archiveofourown.org/users/pinuspinea/gifts).



> Well, pinuspinea, I hope you like strange, experimental reinterpretations of famous ballets, because that's what your works inspired in my brain. Thank you again for so generously gifting me a piece along with the rest of the Swan Lake Comment Club (name pending deletion upon re-edits, lol). I hope you like the one I've managed in return. Be warned: the narrator has a strong, strong voice, and I could not shake it.

To be a successful bartender, you have to be observant.

Now, you don’t have to be detail-oriented. The job isn’t about determining who likes to drink what and which parties will tip the best, though both skills come in handy.

No. Observant means knowing when it’s safe to approach the wine moms in the corner, because Karen’s stopped yelling at Patrice about Tim McGraw or her husband’s affair. Observant is looking at the girl at the end of the bar and redirecting the sleaze who keeps staring at her – or her glass.

Sure, observant bartenders tend to make more than their peers. But observant bartenders also have to _see_ more than their peers. And that – well.

That’s not always a good thing.

Take this story:

Once upon a Friday night, a man with a red beard walks into a bar. His temples are peppered with silver, and he orders whiskey, neat. He looks business, dressed up all in black, and even an observant bartender would write him off as a dull story before he finished his first drink.

That is, until _she_ walks in.

An unobservant bartender wouldn’t have noticed her right off the bat – she looks like any other girl on a Friday night. She’s dressed in white like she’s fresh off the cover of a bridal magazine, complete with pearls in her ears.

But there’s a difference between a girl on a Friday night and a girl on a mission. Observant bartenders can tell the difference between bright, young eyes and eyes aged beyond their years. They know when there’s resignation in the corners of an otherwise glittering smile.

Most importantly, though, this girl comes in alone. Now, it may be rude to assume, but most girls like her don’t spend their Friday nights alone. Even if they want to, they’re usually not alone for long.

But this girl – she walks up to the bar, right alongside the man with the red beard. She stands on her toes, and she asks for something sweet. She doesn’t specify, and her tone’s so sad that she gets an amaretto sour on the house. And instead of wandering towards a booth or the dance floor, she makes herself at home on the barstool next to Ole Red.

Now, Ole Red’s too busy looking at his phone to pay her any mind – or, at least, that’s what he wanted the rest of the bar to think. Any bartender with a lick of self-respect can see a man’s fingers twitch when a young woman sets her drink down, as she pulls out her phone.

Even if he isn’t interested, he’s still paying attention.

And the girl – well. In between sips of her drink and smiles at any young beaus who come her way, she leaves her phone within a finger’s reach.

The man pauses. He stares at it. His brow furrows.

He turns to her.

She doesn’t look at him. Instead, she waves away a group of boys with a bright laugh that, if you listen, sounds a little like a sob.

The man finishes his drink – downs it, tipping his head back and letting his hair touch his shoulders. He sets the empty glass down and slips a twenty under the glass.

Then – finally – she looks at him.

Now, a woman can only look at a man so many ways in a bar on a Friday night. This look – this is no normal look. This look speaks in tongues.

(Ole Red was on the back foot from the moment she walked into the bar. If there was ever a merry war between these two, it was clear, now, that he’d lost.)

And even so, he offers her his arm. Like he’s walked out of a movie or something.

And this girl – she can’t even be assed to look surprised. Instead, she takes another delicate sip of her own drink and leaves it on the counter behind her, right next to his. They walk out of the bar together – and that is that.

*

Or, under normal circumstances, it would have been. If the girl hadn’t shown up in the next day’s paper, reported missing – if the cops hadn’t come snooping around the bar, hadn’t torn through the glassware like they weren’t washed every twenty minutes –

Well. There wouldn’t be a story.

So the girl goes missing, and Ole Red does, too, though his is more of a choice than it is the kind of “missing” that gets reported in the paper.

But two weeks pass – and then, the girl’s back.

Now, again, an observant bartender might not have noticed her. Her hair is different, for one – where it once had been a plain jane brown, now it shines white, like someone dunked her head in bleach. It isn’t stringy, though, hasn’t suffered for the change. She looks like she’s been fucking martyred, like she’s made of something holy.

And her dress – well. Someone must’ve gathered the fabric from the night sky itself; she would’ve matched the shadows if it weren’t for that hair.

She walks in, and the whole bar freezes.

Because she isn’t alone.

Ole Red – he’s there with her. And if she looks like she’s been woven into the heavens, he looks like he’s been given the keys to the Kingdom. Businessmen always smell a little like power, but serving him – it felt a little too natural, a little too good. A little too much like sitting on the edge of a too-happy hurricane.

No one should have that kind of charisma about them. It makes even good men dangerous.

But anyway – the two of them come into the bar, arm in arm. They make themselves at home at the end of the bar and proceed to drink.

And drink.

And drink.

Under normal circumstances, it would have been concerning. After all, couples who come into the bar and try to drown themselves in booze typically aren’t all that happy. But, at the time, it was like there was a block on time; no matter what instincts you had, you found yourself wanting to ignore them.

And that didn’t even account for the _people_ around them.

Now, these two came into the bar alone. But after their first drink…

Well. Maybe it’d been for the best that Ole Red’d never made himself a regular before, because him being there threw the flow of business right off.

Throughout the whole night, all manner of people came to talk to him. Mothers, frat boys, two women dressed in leather – he bought drinks for them all, and they left him happier than they’d arrived. Confused, somehow, too, like they’d looked at him for too long and his face’d gone blurry. Happier, though.

That wasn’t the weirdest part, though.

The strangest thing was the girl. No matter how large the crowd around Ole Red got, not a single person talked to her. They didn’t even look at her. She sat still and silent, pretty as a picture unless ole Redbeard happened to brush her arm. You would've sworn she was a statue if she hadn’t been drinking like a fish.

(And maybe _that_ should’ve been concerning.)

But, like before, the two of them made no fuss. They held their little court, drank their way through the top shelf, and then they left. Ole Red put a hundred under his glass and signed his check, “von Rothbart.” As for the girl – well. Looking back at her first ticket, she’d signed her name with a big ole “O,” and in the papers, they were callin’ her “Odette.” But she didn’t sign no check. Von Rothbart saw to that.

Telling the story, it’s stunning no one called the cops. But thinking about the bar that night – the crowds around the two of them, the way no one really met their eyes - huh. Maybe it’s not that much of a surprise, after all.

*

Now, it goes on like this for a few months. Odette and von Rothbart come in and hold court at the end of the bar. They tip well. They drink. They leave. No one recognizes them, and no one calls the cops.

Coincidentally, crime in the area fucking plummets, but that’s neither here nor there.

This little fairy tale all goes to shit on a Thursday.

Thursday nights are busier nowadays – whoever invented Thirsty Thursday was either a genius or a masochist, but they certainly weren’t a bartender. But when the bar top’s thrumming with that kind of desperate energy, there are more tips to be had and more stories to play out.

This one – and is it a new one, or does it still belong to the other two? – starts with a kid.

He begins his night in the corner, probably celebrating his twenty first, because there was no way this kid could’ve been any older. And, sometime towards the later hours of the evening, he sees the crowd around von Rothbart and Odette.

And he just – fucking waltzes into the center of it.

And for the first time in several months, Odette moves on her own. Her back straightens. Her eyes go wide.

Von Rothbart’s voice cuts off.

Now, there’s a difference between an observant bartender and your average one. Your average bartender could’ve looked at von Rothbart and watched him try to pull himself back from his surprise.

An observant bartender could see the remains of any sense of his composure make themselves at home on the bar’s sticky floor.

And then, this fucking kid – he speaks. Not to von Rothbart. To Odette.

“Have I seen you here before?”

It’s so clearly a line, it’s almost worth losing interest in the play-out. But no one’s spoken to the girl in black and white in months. And her voice, so underused, rings out through the bar, like a chime in a church:

“I doubt it.”

The crowd around the two of them bursts into laughter – the kind that sounds rehearsed. Odette smiles this old, polite smile that’s meant to shoo people away, but the kid doesn’t pick up on the hint.

At her side, von Rothbart leans back against the bar and doesn’t say a damn thing, but it’s clear he’s seeking control. Even as the kid goes to speak again, the crowd moves in his favor, readily driving the boy out of the circle.

The way this man’s shoulders slump in relief – damn. For a few seconds, you have to wonder how he built himself to be such a man of mystery.

And the kid at the edge of the circle clearly agrees.

He hangs around for the rest of the night. You can watch him trying to balance on his toes at the edge of the circle, and by God, is he staring. You’d think the girl was an art exhibit, but even art would struggle to bring out the flush that’d settled on this kid’s cheeks.

Then again, that could’ve been a normal reaction to the sight of a girl who’d been legally missing for a couple of months. But that’s beside the point.

Finally, when von Rothbart signs off on his tab and goes to leave his tip, this boy shoots forward. Before Ole Red can turn, the kid’s got his arm linked with Odette’s. This girl’s stock-still on her stool, looking wildly between the two men like a rabbit caught in a trap.

And there it is, the age old line: “Come home with me.”

It fucking shivers the bar. The glasses on the counter threaten to break.

Odette looks at von Rothbart.

Von Rothbart looks back.

And – well. Well.

*

The next week, business slows down. Odette and von Rothbart don’t return to hold court, and what crowds come looking for them are listless. Drink-less.

The kid doesn’t come back, either, but no one misses him. No one except an observant – and, at this point, nervous – bartender.

And then, it’s Thursday.

And von Rothbart comes in.

Alone.

He shrugs out of his coat at the end of the bar. He orders whiskey, neat. He takes a paper out of his back pocket and starts to read.

A woman in the corner tries to approach him. He waves her away before she can even get within ten feet.

Now, under normal circumstances, that would be that. The situation was already so damn weird, why look closer at the man now that he was alone?

But there are purple shadows beneath his eyes. The nonchalant way he’d held his mouth has gone tight. And, naturally, the girl who looked like she’d been pulled from the stars is nowhere to be found.

He leaves the paper behind when he finishes his drink. Good man, he also leaves his tip. As he steps away from the bar, he – goes still. He looks around.

Now, observant bartenders see a lot of things over the nights that they work. But the grief in this man – the sheer pain in the breath he takes – that’s not one of the things you want to see.

It’s not something you enjoy.

But he does it. He takes his breath, closes his eyes. And then, he walks out into the street.

Picking up his drink and tip is part of the job. Picking up the paper is not. But reading the headline after a show like that – well, that’s inevitable.

Funny thing is, the headline doesn’t stay still. Turn the paper one way, it says one thing. Flip it over, it says another. Turn it upside down, and the whole story changes.

“Son of Local Businessman Rescues Missing Woman From Kidnapper.”

“Son of Local Businessman Missing; Police Suspect Serial Kidnapper At Work.”

“Murder-Suicide In Ilyich Park; Police Identify Missing Girl And Son Of Local Businessman.”

*

Von Rothbart doesn’t come back to the bar, after that. The crowds calm down, crime picks back up, but the story fades.

But a year later, this girl walks in.

Her hair’s plain-jane brown, but she’s wearing a dress that’s been sewn from the stars.

“An amaretto sour, please,” she says, sitting at the end of the bar.

An observant bartender might recognize her. An observant bartender might say something. But sometimes – well.

Best not to make something out of a mystery when it can be a good story, instead.


End file.
